My Cousin Rachel (2017)

Like the 1952 Burton-de Havilland film and the 1983 TV mini-series, this adaptation preserves the feminist thrust of Daphne du Maurier’s novel. 

Phillip’s narration may suggest the film is about one man’s love for a woman. But the plot instead dramatizes and exposes the male’s fear of a powerful, effective, overwhelming woman — to the point that he must demonize and destroy her, even if — or because? — he loves her.  
     That’s Phillip’s last conundrum. Rachel is dead, he is happily married to the safe Louise, but Rachel remains his continuing passion and torment.“This question that I must ask myself, again and again, every day of my life, never to be answered now, until we meet at last in Purgatory. Were you innocent, or were you guilty? Rachel, my torment. My blessed, blessed torment.” 

Was she trying to kill him as he thought she killed her first husband, his cousin Ambrose? Or did he have her all wrong, his suspicions based in his own weakness rather than in her strength? 

After her death all the evidence points to the latter conclusion. Her suspicious Italian mentor/lover turns out famously gay. She was not an adulteress, nor a gold-digger and she was not trying to poison him. Her extravagant spending is explained by the generosity she shows at the Christmas estate dinner. 
      Phillip shared his cousin’s feverish paranoia that would blame the wife for what went wrong. All her apparent guilt was a misrepresentation, shadowed by his prejudice. The issue is not her ambivalence but his insecure retreat from her. Her desperate "I can't do this again" does not refer to her poisoning him but to her nursing yet another lunatic boy's suspicion. It's spoken in despair not confession.  
       If Rachel's manner may strike us as confirming her the demon her cousin lovers claim, we have to remember that the film is from Phillip's perspective. He provides the voice over, so the inflections in the characters' behaviour, especially Rachel's, aare shaped by his bias at the time. The film ends on Phillip happily married but still profoundly tormented by the suspicion he misjudged the woman he so passionately loved.  

The tension is in the title. Rachel is not his cousin but his cousin’s widow. When Phillip leaves her that title after Ambrose’s death  he reveals his uncertainty about her. How kindred is she, whether in blood, spirit, character, humanity. How “cousin” is she? The "cousin" excludes his acceptance of her as his "love." The title like his fear keeps her at a distance.

At first he’s persuaded she’s an outlaw usurper. When he falls in love he loses that suspicion. But in the boy’s insecurity before such a powerful woman, he relapses into demonizing her.  

Phillip is the stunted boy emerging from the narrows of the man’s world. “The only women allowed in the house were the dogs” (i.e. Women are bitches). That misogyny is the family males' sickness. When he comes across his dying cousin’s plea for help Phillip resolves to make Rachel suffer for everything Ambrose did.  “Whatever it cost my cousin in pain and suffering before he died I will return with full measure upon the woman that caused it.” 
      That resolve holds up till he meets her. But after succumbing to her charms, in his insecurity he returns her to her guilt, i.e., his fear. Instead of avenging his cousin he repeats his madness by blaming her for his weakening. Blame the woman when the manhood wilts.

The film contrasts two kinds of women. Louise is blonde, appealing, attractive, convenient, the daughter of his guardian lawyer. Compared to Rachel, she is safety personified. She will live under Phillip’s control as both submitted to her father’s. Over his affection for her Phillip can keep control. Yet especially for that period Louise is a surprisingly strong woman. Beyond decorum, she asks Phillip if he lets his dogs shit on the floor. She seems to have a clear sense of what Phillip is. At the end, her apparent approval of Rachel ranks among the reasons for Phillip's remorse. 

In contrast, Rachel is as dark as she is mysterious, unsettling, overwhelming. Phillip can’t control his feeling for her: “Because I love her and nothing else! It isn't a little loving. It isn't a fancy. It isn't something you'd turn on and off. It's everything I think and feel and want and know. And there's no room in me for anything else. And never will be again.” 

Rachel will not be controlled. She angrily rejects Phillip’s buying her with an allowance. In response, he buys her at a higher price, by imposing on her his bequest of everything he has on the sole condition the estate would revert to him should she marry. This is a boy trying to buy a woman he lacks the manhood to win or to hold or to trust. 

Ambrose’s and Phillip’s disease reads as their failure to stand hale and secure before her. The herbal wisdom she brings from the East only confirms their suspicion. The bitch is a witch. Her strength is a threat. What she knows and they don't will destroy them. 
       Of course the man is as damaged and restricted  by his misogyny as the woman he rejects. If there is an actual murderer here, it’s Phillip, who in his madness sends Rachel riding on the dangerous cliff that -- like the men -- crumbles under her. When he apostrophizes Rachel at the end he only bemoans his own failure as a man to have respected the superior woman.
       DuMaurier wrote middle-brow potboilers. But now and then she struck down to an archetypal bedrock.